Google Effect: Is Technology Making us Stupid?

“The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV,” Writes Nicholas Carr in his article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? In Carr’s article, he examines the controversial issue of whether the intensive use of the Internet affects the human mind. Today, the Internet has become apart of and has affected a myriad amount of homes all around the world. From social networking, research, and even online shopping, the Internet is the main used device everywhere.
When it comes to the Internet, the one thing that immediately comes to mind is the most common search engine, Google. Google is the most common multilingual and used search engine in the worldwide web, handling more than three billion searches each day. Many people think of Google as a gateway to the entire Internet. Google helps people to get answers to questions without intellectually challenging themselves. This search engine has helped, and still does, many people around the world to research articles, tools for business; to contact one another, and many other life-applied sources in less than 1 second.
Having Google grant us an effortless method in researching essentially anything helps us become unintelligent or in other words, stupid. The Internet is filled with all sorts of different distractions, and we all have a harder time with distractions. The information that we “learn” through the Internet helps us forget as we get older, and the Internet will only make it worse. These days it is indeed much easier to find information by searching online to get the answer or solution. Before Google was created, it was more challenging to research information by reading through encyclopedias or dictionary’s.

In my opinion, researching by this method would help us gain more knowledge towards our lives. The effort given into researching through textbooks about the topic vs. using Google does help us gain more knowledge by helping memorize and understand the topic more efficiently and clearly. As in school for researching to prove a specific topic, teachers occasionally have a preference of not using a search engine since we never know what is true and to avoid plagiarism. Google on the other hand, would give us the answer even in detail, but we do not know if it is the right answer.
Everything on the Internet is not always true. Google can, as well, make us intelligent. To become universally familiar with technology and how it is improving everyday can help us all with our lives in the future. For simple questions in areas like cooking, or safety, Google being available at the tip of our fingers is much more convenient to find and look for answers online than going to the library and use their dictionary’s every time. Having Google be there for us tends to lead us all in situations of procrastination, too.
In Carr’s article, he writes about Google, ”The Company has declared that its mission is “to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful. ” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want. ” Having Google advancing more and more each day, adding more information, answering numerous amounts of questions, Google can also help us become more intelligent.
In conclusion, the Internet is the most popular device, which is, used daily by millions and millions of people around the world. Google is the most used search engine over the world. This search engine helps us all become both unintelligent and intelligent. Google does help us become unintelligent by being filled with all sorts of distractions like social medias. But, Google does also help others to be intelligent by convenience and learning about the advancing technology.